


subtle pantomime

by reinacadeea



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M, Oliver pov, academic references, hiv is mentioned briefly, i am an english/american major so most references to that, oliver gets a last name, references to other relationships - Freeform, rollercoaster of internalized doubt, some derogatory comments from clueless idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-15 23:55:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14152146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reinacadeea/pseuds/reinacadeea
Summary: a twist of fate and the glossy memories of the past startles into technicolor.or, "cause once you go without it, nothing else will do"





	subtle pantomime

**Author's Note:**

> my first work for the fandom. i'm late to the party but taken in nonetheless. i haven't posted anything for a year i think, so i'm kinda nervous. 
> 
> title is taken from giorgio morodor's "lady lady lady" and the inspiration for the fic came during a harry styles concert when he sang "meet me in the hallway".
> 
> note at the end

we don’t talk about it,  
it’s something that we don’t do,  
cause once you go without it,  
nothing else will do

 

The influence of Greek mythology is easy to see. It permeates art, when the president speaks on TV, the kings shown throughout Europe’s many capitals. Its strings are never ending, and this is simple. It is easy to interpret in one way, but as it always in academia, interpretation is only that; a personal opinion no matter how clever the wording.

“It speaks to the very nature of love,” a student speaks up, an accent of some sort clear in her intonation. He wishes to know her more, her flat voice an indication of the north central Europeans countries.

The study of ancient Greece is universal and its affect unavoidable. His next dissertation will be on college courses on Greek etymology. Perhaps anyway. He’s been undecided, lacking inspiration, for so long now that he no longer remembers the first paper he thought to write. He remembers wisps of inspiration in the alcove beside the Roman inspired pool in the Perlman villa. But like so much of that summer lays buried beneath adult responsibilities.

It’s been years.

And love exists in the world, he knows with a startling clarity. He felt it, was immersed in it.

He stops by Sal’s place on the way home after class. They smoke after, sated for now, Sal’s eyes following him going through the motions of redressing, smoke trying to sate something inside him.

“Later,” he departs with and is followed outside by angry silence.

Liz doesn’t wait for him, not anymore, used to his stony silences. It’s incredibly how someone can get used to misery. She is miserable, shoulders hunched beneath her ears as she lays with her back to him and he doesn’t blame her. The bed feels stifling even though it was the biggest his parents’ money could buy.

It starts much before this misery. Not long before, but before the before. It starts with a passionate boy at the cusp of manhood, so clever and intelligent that he felt both like a giant and an ant by his side.

Elio Elio Elio Elio...

But Elio is the prelude. A part of him he can treasure with no outside interference. Because Italy was a dream.

Oliver is fifteen when he realizes that boys are pretty.

“Boys are not pretty,” his father determinately remarks from his throne at the end of the table.

But they are.

He’s twenty-nine now and he still finds men as sensual and alluring as ever. Sal is tan, always tan, olive skin, born with sun-kissed skin. His hair is dark and plentiful and his chest. His great-grandparents went through Ellis Island with a flyer and nothing else. Sal is the first to go to college, privileged with working-class parents and a drive. His passion sparks inside Oliver, something he recognizes in himself. Academia is terrible and beautiful together and apart. Interesting, so very interesting, but fleeting for so many and forgotten in their daily artless lives.

They have sex for the first time in his office, Sal leaning against the desk while Oliver kisses the planes of his chest, hungry, starving.

He doesn’t think about his wife or his baby boy. It’s apart. Different.

He doesn’t think about them the next time or the next. The wanton sexual energy has renewed his passion for existing and the days seem suddenly brighter. He forgets the clarity sex with men gives him, the rightness and sureness. It’s only after that reality sets in and shame clouds his heart.

Sal enjoys the illicitness of it all, the cloak and dagger of the affair. It’s his first but it’s not Oliver’s. The pandemic has run through the population for years, shaming and startling the free-spirited universities to act in solidarity. He claimed his cousin’s body when no one would and buried him alone and said his prayers that the baby had kept him from the scene. Sal is the first in years.

But it runs its course, of course, like these things do. Oliver doesn’t leave his wife and Sal finds a boyfriend.

“He’s a musician,” Sal says proudly in his office, meeting again under a pretence of study. “We can’t see each other again.”

“I hope he makes you happy,” Oliver says and he means it.

“Thank you, though,” Sal tells him nervously. “I’m... glad I knew you.”

Oh love. He will become the man they talk about later in life. He taught me love and passion and then he disappeared from my life just as soon. Maybe this is what he is supposed to be. A peripheral character in someone else’s story.

And life goes on as it always does, the news despairs and the technology changes. The need for books and paper lessens and he misses the simple act of opening a book instead of the confusing mess of new academic references. Everything is a learning curve and the history and humanity studies have to follow otherwise be forgotten in Noam Chomsky’s mechanical brain.

Later, life goes on and he’s with his wife at an auction for the Medieval Lit department. He’s lost her to the other wives and he’s found the background and the cards. Easy money and cigar smoke is familiar because it never changes. Academic decadence is opulence, artists and poets sharing their sonnets, and its pupils latching onto the creativity like tiny individual sponges. Old money runs rampant in New England and he is not immune to its easy pleasures. Neither is Lis for that matter.

She is wearing red and turning heads, the dark eyes and hair from her Tel Aviv childhood. She comes by and pulls him from the poker table, introducing him to the new historian that she has managed to secure for the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

He is proud of her achievements, her thrive for the project and wonders how she manages between that and Adam. The many wonders of the feminine, something that is unfortunately lost to him, not matter how much he tries.

“Professor,” someone says behind him and it’s Sal. It’s been weeks but he looks good, strong, proud.

The sheer nerve he must have had to walk up to him, wife at his side, and stand there with no shame...

“I want you to meet someone special,” Sal says and reaches out to a mop of dark hair, all broad shoulders and long skinny legs.

It’s seconds. Parts of a second. The world stops, stands still. The past screams back into Technicolor, moving from the muted memories that he has persisted on for so long.

Elio Oliver.

In one and the same breath. Whisper. Past. Love.

Fuck.

Reset.

“You know each other?” someone asks. Possibly Sal.

“Oliver was one of my father’s post-grad students,” Elio says, his voice, and his eyes are cool, observant.

“You’re Professor Perlman’s son,” Lis says, observantly. “The world is truly growing smaller by the day.”

“Lis worked with your father last year,” Oliver says uneasily.

Elio lifts his cigarette to his lips, avoiding, staring. His eyes are dark, pupils blown. 

A slim hand pulls on his arms and a pretty blonde woman whispers something into his ear. He nods and mutters something to her. In French, Oliver thinks, from the way his lips move over the words, easy, delicately.

“Excuse me,” Elio says and follows her.

“Elio’s band was invited to play here tonight,” Sal says proudly. “Direct invite from the Dean himself.”

Of course. As if Elio was anything but worthy of any honor.

The music is soulful, hopeful, full of sensual energy and underlined by the beautiful voice of the blond woman Elio had spoken to. She sings in a mixture of English and French, deep and breathy. Elio sits right behind her, guitar slung over his back and dark curls falling onto his forehead.

“Professor Perlman said his son was talented,” Lis remarks.

Oliver shushes her. He doesn’t want to miss a thing.

Rewind.

He meets Lis in 1978 in the synagogue that his parents frequent. She is a fresh face in the little community that he grew up in, rich, successful and Jewish. She kisses him behind the diner a week later and talks about her dreams. He loves her ambition and falls in love with the way she doesn’t find his interests odd.

His father wants him to run for office, a family tradition.

“Proud to be us,” his father said. “We are Jewish and proud and the biggest threat facing us now is taxes.”

Their fling was casual at best, a comfort more than anything. Conventionalist families, tradition bound. At least he could do his mother the small favor of marrying Jewish. A small thing compared to the things he can never tell her.

What is his life without Adam? Loveless and worn at the skin of his sleeves. Adam is unconditional and precious, a legacy he never thought would befall him.

But the ‘but’ is what hurts the most staring at Elio from across the room. He understands why Sal dumped him for Elio and tries to imagine one day finding the courage to hold another man’s hand and proudly proclaim ‘I love this man’. Tries to imagine holding Sal’s hand in front of Pro (because it’s always Pro he wants to impress) and can’t.

He stares so intently at Elio that he doesn’t register what he plays until Elio chances a glance up and between songs plays Bach.

Just like Bach would have wanted it.

Elio Elio Elio I remember everything Elio Elio Elio.

He smiles.

He stays with the poker players long after the party dies down, waiting. He watches through the corner of his eyes as Elio kisses Sal goodnight and wordlessly pulls over a chair like he would in Crema and light up another smoke.

His legs are longer, Oliver thinks.

The universe is with him, emboldened by Elio’s presence. And he wins and then wins again.

He wins thousands.

“We should talk.”

Oliver agrees and they walk in silence until they reach an open diner. He buys them both coffee and peach pie for the hell of it.

Elio doesn’t touch the pie.

No matter the distance and perspective he has been given, Oliver still believes in his heart of hearts that Elio may have been his best love. His truest love. A summer romance he will remember fondly for the rest of his life, something he will tell Adam about when he is much older and going through the angst of being a boy of a certain age.

“Have the courage I never had,” will be his best advice. “Be your best version.”

“Why did you play Bach?” he asks.

“Because I wanted your attention,” Elio says boldly.

“You have it.”

Elio shrugs like he knew already.

They sit in silence.

“Are you happy?” Elio asks.

“Yes,” Oliver lies.

Elio quirks his eyebrow. “’For the substantial world, with its prospects of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him’.” 

“Are you calling BS on me?” Oliver says mock-offended.

“I have seen you truly free and now you are trapped.”

Trapped.

Yeah, he’s trapped, and he would like to say it’s all circumstance. Adam was a circumstance that he found something earth shattering in, but the marriage. That he could do without.

He clears his throat. “How’s your mother?”

Elio doesn’t take the bait, but Oliver pleads until eventually he does. And they talk about superficial things, like old friends do, like the past was an easy thing. But it was, loving Elio has been the easiest thing Oliver had ever done.

He’s here for the semester, visiting from the Paris Conservatory with his music group. Another six weeks. Why is it always six weeks?

They part in the morning, wistful and slowly, standing outside the diner sharing a cigarette. The ease, the elephant...

“Oliver,” Elio says. They’ve hugged, another never ending one, and traded ‘laters’ but Oliver doesn’t want to turn away from him, drinking in the shape of his nose, the sharp curves of his cheekbones.

“What?”

“You look good,” Elio says and it isn’t shy. Their eyes are connected and it sparks

Oliver can feel the blush. It warms through his body. 

“You, too.”

Elio smiles sadly and turns away. Oliver watches him go, unable to turn away until he’s out of sight. 

He takes a cab to his office, after, and lies on the sofa, head leaning on the armrest and feet dangling over the edge. He stares at the cracked ceiling, watching his cracked life play out in terrible detail.

Elio who he barely knows dares pass judgment. They knew each other so briefly, barely a moment in a life. Yet, what he says matters in a way few peoples’ opinion rarely do.

Oliver loves himself in an abstract way. He doesn’t mind his body or the way he spends his days. He’s a passionate academic and an active poker player for pleasure. It’s the other parts of himself, the parts in the inside, that are harder to crack.

Uncomfortable. He’s uncomfortable.

No, no, no...

Just think, Oliver. What does Elio see?

He picks up the cordless and punches in a number he already remembers. He asks for Elio. It shuffles. Low voices.

“Beers tomorrow?” he asks and Elio hums in agreement.

“I play at Le Artisán. But after, yes?”

Forward forward forward, he thinks of the hours dragging by.

And Elio’s stay continues rushing by, stopped only by meetings without the inclusion of Sal and a respectable distance, no touching, no glances. Just talking. He listens to Elio playing most nights, savoring, devouring. Sometimes, he sees Sal in the corner of his eyes. But his excuse is excuse enough. Old friends reuniting. He is just that because Sal would never think...

Elio plays contemporary music sometimes, composing and writing. It’s hearty and exploratory, full of T. S. Elliot like elitism in his subtle references, a true child of academia. He plays softly in the corner of Oliver’s office some days, fingers sliding over the strings, trying and probing, stopping to scribble in a worn notebook. Oliver grades and goes through the usual motions.

Except today, the light catches in Elio’s hair and he hits a particular note and suddenly he’s standing up, rounding the corner of his desk and cradling Elio’s face with both his hands. Elio stops and lets it happen, closes his eyes and then all Oliver can feel is the slide of lips against his, the poke of an inquisitive tongue and his heart thumps loudly in his ears.

“No,” he protests softly when Elio pushes him away with a gentle hand on his chest. The hand is insistent. “Don’t.”

“Stop,” Elio breathes out. “I can’t.”

Oliver scrunches his eyes shut and rests his forehead against Elio’s before reluctantly moving backwards and away. It’s a physical impossibility but so is love.

The awkwardness of Elio’s earliest attempts at seduction are trumped by a sensual young man who knows how to navigate the sexual nature of their attraction to each other. It is Oliver who is the novice now, unable to handle the uncertainty of Elio in his life and the sheer magnitude of importance he has on Oliver’s day to day.

“You are never home,” Lis remarks over a cup of coffee one morning. Adam is talking about something or other and she agrees absentmindedly.

“I know. I’ll do better,” he says.

“Good,” she says and buries her nose in yet another document.

—

Dear Elio

This is the letter I should have sent you back then. But the magnitude of what my summer in Crema meant to me hadn’t hit yet.

My jealousy paramounts as the days accumulate. I count the minutes hungrily, treasuring our minuscule time together, and thinking horrified at the day of your departure like you once told me you dreaded mine. How our situations have changed. Here you are the exotic one, the entity of which the simple mind cannot understand. Instead, the world gets to know you like I understand you. I price your knowledge like a hungry student, wishing to crawl inside the mind of his teacher and instantly understand the complicated nature of love.

Because what is love to a seventeen year-old? For me, it was the certainty that I was wrong, that I wished for unnatural things. For you, it was a father who has a heart filled with unfathomable understanding and a mother who dares love beyond her comfort. You, my love, who had the world at your feet and loved me anyway. Because I was you and you were me and I understand desire when I watch your eyes connect with mine, the way they shone, shine. Elio, I called myself, Elio Elio...

You whispered my name and was proud to have known me. But I am not proud to know myself. I am gay, I think, and this letter is my confessor. I will never love any women the way I love you. My heart is broken into tiny emotionless machines and I don’t know how to mend them.

I contemplate these feelings inside me around you and I understand this without pain; I loved you fully and wholly. I desired every part of you. I broke me. I am parted, half a heart. Mend me, please, free me from this misery of a life that I cannot fully escape. And maybe you understood when you quoted Woolf for me when we met again or maybe it was merely you describing you.

This is a wish list, a confessional, but a wish nonetheless because I am Oliver. This is me and I can barely recognize the person in the mirror if I don’t look at myself in relation to you.

With deep admiration and never-ending love and dedication,

Your Oliver

—

Adam’s fourth birthday always brings his parents to town from their otherwise calm New England town far away from his daily life. Their presence is tiring but they dote on his son with a singled-minded fierceness that he admires. He spends the morning making pancakes and simply being there, enjoying his son and his colorful curious mind. It’s early May, right before the exam race and they are going to have a party outside, weather depending.

It’s hard to feel present, just like it has for so long now, like the disconnect it tearing him apart from the inside. But he was the son of an absent father and he doesn’t want that to be the only image Adam has of him when he grows older.

The smile on his lips is forced but the joy in Adam’s eyes warms his dead heart.

Right before dinner time, Elio and Sal comes knocking and brings a gift that is far too generous considering the history between them.

“Sal is my TA, father,” Oliver explains.

“Hello,” Sal says nervously when greeting the towering presence of his father.

Michael Goldstein doesn’t smile, but his manners are impeccable when he shakes Sal’s hand.

“And Elio Perlman,” he introduces, placing a specific emphasis on Elio’s Jewish name, but he sees David’s Star nestled between his button-up shirt, an unmistakable symbol. “His father consults with the Heritage Museum.”

It’s easier to say ‘Elio is a part of a proud Jewish project’ than his father does roughly the same work that Oliver himself does. Because the sort of academia that Oliver does isn’t education, it’s art and art is not something one should spend one’s time on. It’s the first time Elio is here at all, in his house, and he doesn’t understand why. He’s been so careful to keep Elio away, to not push his family in his face, rubbing salt on a wound that seeps puss and inflammation. Yet, he must have mentioned it in passing.

“Ah of the Jersey Perlmans?” Michael exclaims.

“No, Michael,” Lis remarks from the kitchen.

“We’re international Jews,” Elio says and he’s proud. “American via Yale and French-Italian by way of Panthéon-Sorbonne Université in Paris.” 

Oliver quirks his eyebrow in Elio’s direction, but Elio returns his gaze with determined eyes and suddenly he feels on guard. Elio must have come here to see his parents specifically.

“He thinks he’s better than us,” Michael mutters when Sal and Elio are in another room. “A musician! Whatever for.”

Oliver doesn’t reply.

It’s difficult to see his parents and Elio in the same room. It feels like his life is being scrutinized, as if now suddenly Elio knows something. The whole thing is so extraordinarily awkward that through dinner he lets his father talk politics, his wholly conservative politics that he knows Sal and Elio must be fundamentally against. Sal, however, is a trooper and doesn’t let the atmosphere disturb him. Instead, he talks to Adam and it shows that he has younger siblings.

Elio is another thing.

Oliver nearly laughs at the circumstances he has created for himself. In an attempt to fix his own lifeless life, he found comfort in Sal, who then dumped him for Elio. It’s a circle so grotesque that absurdness seems a far too easy word to describe whatever is happening now. Maybe fate is slapping him silly, looking through their single eye and asking him to pay attention.

“Have you taken the test?”

Oliver shakes himself out of his thoughts and zooms back to the present, not quite understanding why this particular question captured his attention. Maybe it’s the particular sharpness of Elio’s eyes on his father or the condescending tone that slipped past his father’s lips.

“Michael! That’s impolite,” Lis admonishes. Oliver suddenly adores her fiercely.

“It is impolite to be a homosexual and wear our star, dear Lis,” his father says.

The room goes silent, cold.

“Imbicile,” Elio mutters under his breath, continuing on in French.

“Elio,” Oliver says sharply and the look he gets in return is utter betrayal.

Elio pushes his chair back angrily and stands up. “Bigot,” he parts with and strides out of the room.

Sal makes weak excuses and follow.

One night, at Monet’s beam, they made love. The grass was itchy and the mosquitos were intruders but the moment itself is burned into his memory with startling clarity. The moon had been high and given Elio’s pale skin a bluish taint. He remembers the poetry in his mind, how it had felt like he was pulled out from the inside, wrung. He had licked the tears from Elio’s eyes and Elio had done the same to him. It had seemed eternal, something ever-lasting.

Life had never seemed clearer. Now, it’s grey.

The New York night is bright but artificial. The people tired and lifeless. He sees young people strung out at Elio’s dorm, too high to care about him.

Knock.

Knock.

“Elio?”

The door opens.

The man staring back at him is no boy.

“I hate him,” he says fervently.

“You came looking for a fight,” Oliver tells him.

Elio doesn’t correct him. They both know.

“Where is Sal?” Oliver asks.

Elio shrugs. “I was waiting for you.”

You could have waited a long time, he doesn’t say, but somehow he thinks Elio already knew he would come.

He’s invited inside a private space and it looks just different from the room in the villa but it smells the same. Memory of a smell is strange because it comes at you, attacks you when you least expect it.

He leans against a closet, wooden, watching Elio inhabit the space, coming closer. He stiffens, waiting for a touch, and when it does come, he is still surprised.

Elio’s fingers frame his face, turning it down so that they are staring at each other. Oliver closes his eyes, trying to escape but Elio is metaphysical, beyond the limits of vision.

“Pick me,” a breath against his lips.

Their lips connect.

Pick me.

Pick me.

Pick me.

“No.”

He’s on a coil.

Elio backs away. “Okay.”

Come back, he screams. Save me.

Oliver looks at man in front of him and regrets that they couldn’t have been suspended in time at the train station in Clusone. They should have been like that. Instead, this is the end and it’s heartbreaking.

—

He hears from Sal that he’s gone.

He finds a poker game, then another, then another. He relishes the adrenaline because it’s comparison is... somewhat close.

He’s called into the dean’s office and told to get his career back on track. How? He asks. Write. He’s told. Write what? You figure it out.

It’s the last day. Sal comes into his office, bringing with him a bottle of whisky and two glasses.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Oliver says.

Sal pours and sits down, face to face.

“No one else knows, so I’ll do it,” he says. “I’ll talk about it.”

“Talk about what?”

“I love Elio, but Elio loves you.”

Oliver takes the glass and downs it.

Sal pour him another. “So, you knew?”

Oliver nods.

“Does he know about us?”

“No,” he says, voice hoarse. “No one knows.”

Sal wipes the tears from his eyes. “I went through your desk three days ago and I wasn’t snooping, I promise.” There’s a letter in his hand. Not a letter. The confessional. “Why are you living like this?”

“How else is there.”

“Oliver, it doesn’t have to be like that anymore. The world is changing.”

Oliver snorts.

“You should tell him. He would want to know,” Sal’s voice is soft.

“We had our moment in time,” Oliver says.

They drink in silence.

The past and the present, the contemporary and the future collides into this life. This life where Sal’s broken heart returns him to Oliver’s bed, both longing for someone far away. The silence is deafening and Oliver misses his friend. He misses Elio like a limb. Before they had been frozen in time, but this time Elio is real. Maybe it’s the glossy atmosphere of memory, yes, yes it is, and now that he knows Elio feels and exists with the same immediacy as him...

Lis catches him with his literal pants down, caught in one too many lies and gives him a blank stare.

“You can be free now!” Sal yells after them. “You don’t have to hide!”

She cries that night, hysterical cries of inconsolable grief. Of what he doesn’t understand. It was barely a marriage before, cold and unfeeling.

“We all make stupid choices, Oliver,” she says as they sit across from each other sharing a smoke.

“I don’t want to be like this,” he tells her.

“You can’t live your father’s life. But I won’t divorce you either. It goes against everything I believe in.”

“We won’t be happy,” he says.

She shrugs. “No, but we won’t be alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> this does not have a happy ending. 
> 
> i'm on tumblr as reinacadeea but i mostly post about british soap operas. leave a comment and i'll be happy as a clam


End file.
